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Foundation vs Material Design: What are the differences?
- Grid System: Foundation uses a customizable grid system that allows for different column arrangements, offsets, and alignments, while Material Design follows a 12-column grid system with fixed gutters and margins, providing a more structured layout.
- Components: Foundation offers a wide range of pre-designed components like buttons, navigation bars, and forms, which can be easily customized, whereas Material Design focuses on consistent design principles like depth, movement, and material surfaces to create a cohesive user experience.
- Styling: Foundation provides a more flexible and customizable styling approach with various SASS variables and mixins, allowing for extensive theme customization, while Material Design follows strict guidelines regarding color palettes, typography, and animations for a consistent visual language across different platforms.
- Interactivity: Foundation emphasizes interactions through its JavaScript plugins and animations, offering a variety of dynamic UI elements, whereas Material Design focuses on motion design by using transitions, animations, and touch feedback to enhance user experience and to create a sense of depth.
- Compatibility: Foundation is designed to be responsive and works well across different devices and screen sizes, with a mobile-first approach, while Material Design is specifically optimized for Google's platforms, like Android, providing a seamless experience within the Google ecosystem.
- Community Support: Foundation has a strong community backing with regular updates, support forums, and documentation, making it easier for developers to find resources and resolve issues, whereas Material Design, being a Google framework, offers extensive documentation and resources specific to its guidelines.
In Summary, Foundation and Material Design differ in their grid systems, components, styling approaches, interactivity features, compatibility with platforms, and community support.
I am a bit confused when to choose Bootstrap vs Material Design or Tailwind CSS, and why? I mean, in which kind of projects we can work with bootstrap/Material/Tailwind CSS? If the design is made up on the grid, we prefer bootstrap, and if flat design, then material design. Similarly, when do we choose tailwind CSS?
Any suggestion would be appreciated?
I don't know about material design.
You would go with Bootstrap if you want to prototype / build something without bothering about the design at all and you are OK if everything looks kinda template-y, using bootstrap out of the box components.
Go with Tailwind if you need a sleek design, a user interface where building with components will be important (because tailwind strongly favors component-based UI), and you know you will need to extend the built-in classes with your own (because tailwind is very easy to extend)
I would personally recommend tailwind over bootstrap any day of the week.
Hi Ashish,
If you need minimal work to be done from your end and like most of the components / design available out of the box - go with Bootstrap. This is the oldest and has the widest adoption and a whole range of components built out by others.
If you like Material design, this is a good choice too. Please note that Bootstrap also has a Material theme, though it is not as native.
Both of these above frameworks are bulky and has more than what you may need.
If you like to build micro-components in a elegant way, TailwindCSS is the way to go.
Tailwind is great you don't have to mess with naming things and it is so much more flexible than the cookie cutter bootstrap, but I don't know about material UI. I recommend tailwind it's super simple to learn and has great code snippets.
Put simply, you should use Tailwind regardless. It is a great addition to whatever you use because it removes the hassle of writing CSS.
Ant Design offers the most components with JS and CSS taken care of. They look clean, professional, and usable.
We paired this with Bulma for making the containers and structure reactive. Bulma (for react) make it easy to just add a section, container, and content and have it work on all platforms.
We also use Geist UI, though not recognized by Stack share, for its simple and modern feel. Highly recommend Geist if you want modern components for complicated UI's
Pros of Foundation
- Responsive grid160
- Mobile first93
- Open source80
- Semantic75
- Customizable72
- Quick to prototype52
- Simple ui50
- Fast45
- Best practices44
- Easy setup39
- Neutral style6
- HTML, SCSS and JS6
- Accessibility support5
- Professional5
- Xy grid3
- Sass2
- Every new version is smaller, smarter & more efficient2
- Robust1
Pros of Material Design
- They really set a new bar in design5
- An intuitive design4
- Simply, And Beautiful3
- Many great libraries2
- Composants0
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Cons of Foundation
- Requires jQuery5
- Awful site4
Cons of Material Design
- Sometimes, it can hang the browser2
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